For Tuccis, food is family affair

Thursday

Oct 4, 2012 at 6:00 AM

By Frank Bruni THE NEW YORK TIMES

To appreciate how much food means to the actor Stanley Tucci and his extended family, you have to hear the stories about his maternal grandmother, Concetta Tropiano, who pickled her own tomatoes, canned her own pears, curdled her own ricotta, brewed her own beer and fattened her own chickens, rabbits and goats in Verplanck, N.Y., about an hour’s drive north of New York City.

You have to hear in particular about her doughy twilight, when death came knocking but she was too busy with focaccia to answer the door.

This was in the mid-1990s, when she was in her late 80s. A stroke mostly paralyzed her left arm, limiting her kitchen work. She nonetheless insisted on doing something as she recovered, and used the kneading of dough as therapy, the making of pizza — and focaccia — as rehabilitation.

About a year after the stroke, a devastating infection forced the amputation of her left leg. Relatives gathered to comfort her as she emerged from surgery.

“To cheer her up, we asked her to tell us, again, how to make stuffed artichokes,” recalled Joan Tucci, her daughter and Stanley’s mother. “She went through the whole thing.”

“I thought the nurse was going to die,” Joan Tucci added. “Only an Italian would talk about food at a time like this.”

Joan Tucci lost her mother in 1997, when Tropiano was 88. But Tropiano’s legacy endures, in part through “The Tucci Cookbook,” a paean to Italian cooking — and to Italian-American families — that is being published next week.

It includes recipes from the Tropiano and Tucci sides of the clan, both of which have roots in Calabria, in southern Italy. It reflects the year in the early 1970s when Joan Tucci and her husband, Stanley Sr., temporarily moved their children to Florence, became familiar with northern Italian cooking and fell hard for lasagne verde. It bows to “Big Night,” a 1996 movie, set in an Italian-American restaurant, that Stanley Tucci not only acted in but also helped write and direct. The movie, in fact, inspired a previous, shorter, less glossy version of “The Tucci Cookbook,” titled “Cucina & Famiglia.”

But beyond all of that, “The Tucci Cookbook,” in which the recipes are interlaced with reminiscences from two generations of Tuccis, suggests the meaty, saucy ways in which a love of food can bind and govern a family. That love has certainly shaped Stanley Tucci’s life and career, in which cooking and eating seem to be the glues for every relationship, the sidebars to every adventure, the grace notes of every achievement.

“Big Night,” an exuberant celebration of culinary obsession, helped put him on the map in Hollywood. More than a decade later, “Julie & Julia,” in which he played Julia Child’s husband, cemented his reputation as one of the movie business’s nimblest character actors.

He recalled that before that movie was shot he told Meryl Streep, who played Child: “You and I need to cook together. I don’t mean to be a nudge and I don’t mean to be Method-y, but we need to be in a kitchen together.” At Streep’s apartment in New York City, they prepared a proper French dinner, with a main course of blanquette de veau and, for dessert, a tarte Tatin.

Tucci, 51, is a proud and avid cook, and at his home in northern Westchester County, not far from Concetta Tropiano’s old stamping grounds, his arsenal of equipment trumps what many restaurants have on hand. In addition to the six burners and acres of counter space in his kitchen, there’s a mammoth stone pizza oven, made in Italy, on the patio outside, along with a gas grill as large as a Fiat, a free-standing paella pan the size of a wading pool, and a coffinlike wood-and-aluminum roasting box, called a Caja China, that can accommodate up to 100 pounds of meat. He likes his dinner parties populous and his friends carnivorous.

Widowed in 2009, he remarried in August, and when he and his bride, Felicity Blunt, 31, tell the story of their courtship, it’s a bloody, gristly narrative.

He first got to know Blunt, a literary agent, at the wedding on Lake Como, Italy, of her younger sister, the actress Emily Blunt, with whom he and Streep had appeared in “The Devil Wears Prada.” When he subsequently traveled to London to shoot “Captain America: The First Avenger,” Felicity, who lived there, showed him some of her favorite restaurants.

They occasionally stayed in an apartment above one of them, the Ledbury, and fondly remember retreating there once with two uncooked pheasants that a chef at the Ledbury had given them. For 90 merry minutes, the lovebirds plucked the feathers from the dead birds.

Later, when Blunt visited his home, they got a 26-pound suckling pig to roast and together used various household tools to sever its head before wrestling it onto a spit.

“It was like ‘Lord of the Flies,’ ” said Blunt, in a dreamy voice, as the couple sat on his patio on an afternoon not long ago.

Tucci recalled that he found her in the kitchen the morning after, in her bathrobe, using her bare hands to tear cold flesh from the piglet for a platter of leftover pork.

8 cups whole plum tomatoes (about two 35-ounce cans), passed through a food mill or pureed in a blender or food processor

3 fresh basil leaves

1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano leaves, or 1 teaspoon dried

In a stew pot over medium-high heat, warm olive oil. Sear stewing beef until brown on all sides, about 10 minutes. Remove from pot, set aside in a bowl.

Add spareribs to pot and sear until brown on all sides, about 10 minutes. Remove ribs and set aside in bowl with stewing beef. (If your pot is big enough to hold all the meat in a single layer, it may be cooked at the same time.)

Stir onions and garlic into pot. Reduce heat to low and cook until onions begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Stir in wine, scraping bottom of the pot clean. Add tomato paste to pot. Pour 1/2 cup warm water into tomato paste can to loosen any residual paste and then pour into pot. Cook to warm the paste through, about 2 minutes. Add tomatoes along with additional 1 cup warm water. Stir in basil and oregano. Cover with lid slightly askew and simmer about 30 minutes.

Return meat to pot, along with any juices that accumulated in bowl. Cover with lid slightly askew and simmer, stirring frequently, until meat is very tender and tomatoes are cooked, about 2 hours. Warm water may be added to sauce, in 1/2-cup portions, if sauce becomes too thick. Yield: 8 servings; time: 3 hours.

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